What is an urban ecosystem? Which dimensions of urban reality do the various aspects of ecosystems reveal to our look and to our judgement? What tools do they enable in the various fields of study involved? To what extent can these additional ‘lenses’ help us reorient how we think about cities and the societies that lives within them? How to engage in ‘transversal’ action within and upon society and the environment?

The first day will explore the variety of scientific approaches to the interaction between society and environment with the aim to contribute to an interdisciplinary approach of these questions, exploring four aspects of the concept of ecosystem: natural ecosystems, social ecosystems, political ecosystems, and knowledge ecosystems.
The second day we will have the occasion to experiment and sketch in four parallel thematic workshops, which are the ecosystems linked to different Brussels' situations studied in the framework of Metrolab project.
The result of these two day conference will put the qualitative bases of the MasterClass on Brussels Ecosystems that will take place in January 2019.

We hope you will join the discussion and nurture the debate with us.

PROGRAMME

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In this first session on political ecosystem we wish to adress political ecology, examining issues that might be raised by a governance that takes non-humans into account. From the 1970s, the eco-marxist discourse of authors such as Henri Lefevbre, André Gorz, and Ivan Illitch have recognized that nature is itself a social and cultural construct. In turn, it has inspired Peter Blaikie and David Harvey’s classical concept of ‘political ecology’, as well as Erik Swyngedouw and Matthew Gandy’s ‘urban political ecology’.
This session will explore how urban political ecology can help us to radically reconceptualize urban nature and the politics of metabolism in relation to contemporary urban policy and urban project.

This session will open a fourth perspective based on the conception of ecology developed by the biologist, anthropologist and psychoanalyst Gregory Bateson in his seminal book Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ecology appears there as an epistemological attitude and an active principle that determines individual and collective subjectivities and production of meaning at each level of social organization. After a short introduction by Bernard Declève, we will invite to gather around a final round table the key-speakers of the day and three members of the Metrolab’s scientific comitee - Elena Cogato-Lanza, Brian Mc Grath,Serge Kempeneers – to explore this perspective.